I make my first Collections

I make my first Collections

I would guess that when the first Kindle user downloaded her or his second book, the desire for Kindle organization was born. 

For years, we could “tag” books.  Basically, you add a note, and then search for the note.  That worked (although it could be a bit dicey with Topaz format books).

With Version 2.5, though, we get a built-in system called Collections.

I talked about the techniques in this earlier post.

 I thought I’d give you a little bit more of a personal take on what I did.

Let me start out by saying I haven’t put any personal documents (except my review copy of The Twiller) on my newest Kindle yet.  Collections will be a lot more useful after I do.

For now, I had:

One personal document (The Twiller)

Two samples

One book from the Kindle store (The Great God Pan, a free classic)

Five things from Amazon: MyClippings; upgrading to Kindle; Welcome Bufo; Kindle User’s Guide; and The New Oxford American Dictionary

My three blogs

The first thing I did was create a Collection called **current.  I figured I’ll keep my current reading in there.  The two asterisks were so it would sort to the top if I chose to sort by Title.  The Twiller went in there.

I created a second Collection called *on deck.  That’s for the ones waiting to be read.  My one other Kindle e-book went there.  It has one asterisk so that, if I sort by Title, it will be below the **current Collection.

Next up, a Collection called Amazon.  I put the five Amazon documents in there.  One interesting thing: it gave me an Amazon logo when I look at the details of the Collection.    Apparently, the Kindle knows the name Amazon.

I had noticed while I was adding items that my samples were being shown as a choice.  I didn’t really anticipate that: I’m pretty sure I had read that other people were unable to put samples into Collections, at least initially.  That’s nice!  I created a Collection called samples, and put them in there.

That was it for Collections…for now.

I tried sorting it alphabetically by title, but honestly, I didn’t like the look of it.  When you do that, the titles are both in the Collections and outside it…that looked messy.

I think it will be easy enough to keep my **current collection at the top.  The only trick will be when I download new books.  However, I tend to download those to my Kindle for PC, and just get them out of the archives when I want them.  That means I’ll deal with those one at a time, which should be pretty easy.

Here’s how it looks sorted by Collections:

 

Sorted by Collections

Here’s how it looks sorted by Title:

 

Sorted by Title

The one thing I wish I could do (but I understand why it would be hard) would be to be able to put my blogs in a Collection.

I did experiment a bit.  I tried a Collection title that was 70 characters long (to get past a possible 64 character limit): no problem.  I restarted the Kindle…my Archives went to zero (which they should typically on a restart), but my Collections were still visible.  When I synced, I still had my proper collections.  Some people have reported problems with that, but I was okay.

All in all, I can see how this will be useful as I more personal documents.  I tend to keep my Kindle store books in the archives, so it won’t help me too much with that.

But it is nice. 

Any experiences you want to share with creating your Collections?  Feel free to leave a comment. 

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

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